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Star
A star is a big ball of plasma that has enough mass to commence fusion, so it emits light. Stars are parts of galaxies, or star clusters within galaxies. There are different colors of stars. The color depends on the temperature of the star, which usually depends on the mass. The mass of the star depicts how the star will live. If it has about 2 Solar Masses or more, it will expand and explode as a supernova. If it is below 2 Solar Masses, it will grow to a red giant and die as a white dwarf. Fusion A star glows because of it's fusion process that takes place in it's core. The core is so hot and has such a big pressure that two atoms can "melt" together and become one, bigger atom. Most stars are in the main sequence and fusion hydrogen (the most simple atom) into helium (the second most simple atom). When that happens, the star emits a photon (energy). When the photon is emitted, it's a gammaphoton, the most energy-rich radiation, but over time and when reflected or passing through matter the photon may lose some of it's energy, becoming more long-waved and turning into x-ray, ultraviolet, visible light, infrared or even microwave or radio frequency. Sizes and Types The Sun is a star in it's main sequence. Compared to other stars the Sun is medium sized, but stars have very diffrent sizes, that differ much more than the sizes of planets. The smallest stars are called quark stars and neutron stars. The neutron stars are made up of neutrons, the sub-atomic particle. Neutron stars are very compact, because the neutrons are packed very close together unlike normal stars that are made up of whole atoms. If Earth was as dense and compact as it could be, it would have the size of a football. A neutron star has a density close to that, while the quark star is even more dense. Then there are the brown dwarfs that are not real stars, but more like very large gas giants that did not have enough mass to start the fusion process. And then there are the white dwarfs, which are often what's left of a normal star when it has thrown away it's outer layers and become a planetary nebula. Over time they may become black dwarfs, but it will likely take houndreds of billions of years, so we may not know completely if it will happen as Big Bang only happened 13.7 billion years ago. The red dwarfs are the most common stars in the universe. They have no more than 40% of the mass of the Sun. They emit light only about 0.01% of the strength of the Sun, and their lumonosity is only about 10% of the Sun. The other normal stars often have sizes after their color, with the exception of red stars. The smallest stars are red, then orange, yellow, white, and then the largest stars are red or blue. The biggest star known, VY Canis Majoris, is a red hypergiant star with 15-25 million solar masses and a radius 1,800-2,100 times the radius of the Sun. It's lumonosity is 200-560 thousand times the lumonosity of the Sun. But as a red star, it has the lowest temperature of stars, which is only about 3,000 kelvin. Classification Stars are classified with letters. Some people remember them by saying "O'h '''B'e '''A 'F'ine 'G'irl/guy, 'K'iss 'M'e. O stars are blue. B stars are blue-white. A stars are white. F stars are yellow-white. G stars are yellow. K stars are orange. M stars are red. See also *Planet *Sun *Galaxy *Star cluster Category:Star glossary